
We spent an afternoon on one of the large lawns of O’Reilly’s Rainforest Retreat watching a small flock of Superb Fairy-wrens searching for tiny insects in the grass and in the surrounding garden shrubs. The female Superb Fairy-wren does not have the distinctive blue and black feathers that adorn the male of the species. They are fairly drab by comparison except for the orange feathers surrounding the eye. I watched this female perched atop a fern frond, tugging on a clump of white fuzz of some sort and pulling off bits of it. Perhaps it was potential nesting material. The fuzz did not look like it was any kind of natural garden substance; it looked like polyester stuffing so its appearance on a fern frond was a bit puzzling.